Suze Orman

Everybody calls it a recession, but it was a true depression in my opinion.

They lost their jobs because

They then didn't have the money to do what?

Pay their mortgage payments.

Then what happened at that point is they couldn't even borrow against the value in their homes because they didn't have a job.

if they had credit cards, do you remember this, everybody?

If they had credit cards and they had available limits, so many people got letters saying, your credit limit has been frozen now, if you had a credit card, or it will pay you actually to pay off

your credit card.

Everything kind of came to a stop and people didn't know where to turn.

And here's what was so fascinating about that is as real estate started to go down and down and down and people were losing their jobs,

as the stock market went down about 50 to 57%, you know, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index went down during that period of time, almost 57% from about October, I think it was a 2007 to March of 2009.

Think about that.

So there was really no place to get money and that wasn't the time to be selling stocks and things like that.

What happened, which really was a big financial home wake-up call, is that you think your homes are worth X. They may be worth X right now, but if your neighbor happens to be laid off

happens to lose their job.

Oh, AI has displaced them.

Oh, they don't have an emergency savings account.

They've already maxed out their credit cards.

Everything is so expensive for them and they don't have the money to pay their mortgage payment.

And it goes on for one month or two months or whatever.